voiceless wonder

31Jan10

I dare you:  spend one hour, no talking.  No vocalizing whatsoever.  That means even no whispering.  No singing, yelling, grunting, laughing, nothing.

Then imagine this is your life for a few days.

Only then will you be able to remotely understand what I am currently going through.  Doctor put me on vocal rest (among other things, but that is another post altogether) for the weekend because my voice seems to crap out after about an hour of presenting/projecting my voice.  Now I need my voice for work.  Not many people in my profession do well without a voice.  I am a bit concerned because I have been having this problem for awhile now.  However, I sing karaoke quite dramatically which I suppose can be vocally damaging.  I talk over people at said karaoke events, which is extremely vocally damaging.  Right now, though, I am also coming off of  a cold which has been awful for nearly two weeks.  I am going to hope this is an outlier and I am back to myself my tomorrow or the next day.  No singing for a few weeks, though, bummer.

I thought vocal rest would be very good, a reasonable discipline to a person like me who talks more than I breathe.  So I figured I would take this whole thing in stride.  Also, due to this 2 week long cold, it has been quite painful to speak and so I saw the situation as a general win-win.

It was like that for the most part.  Until I needed to actually communicate some things.  I know some sign language because for years I was a social worker and a few of the clients on my caseload used it to communicate, so I became quite proficient.  I had all but forgotten many of the signs, or so I had thought.  Suddenly when I wanted to communicate but found it impossible or really painful to speak, then I remembered all the signs in the book.  But signs matter zero if no one knows how to read them.  So there you have it.  My weekend.  I have been communicating to the world via facial expression and notes on my ipod touch.  I have no comedic timing and by the time I type out what I want to say the conversation of the group has moved through thirteen other topics.  The frustration that I feel has gotten to the point where I would actually like to SLAM my head into a wall, and all I was trying to say at the time was, “Hey, what are you doing later?”

(I thought for a brief moment about how small children who cannot use language must feel.  The frustration must be absolutely sanity robbing, at best. )

I hope my voice is back to somewhat normal by tomorrow, which is the first day I am allowed to try speaking.  Doctor said I should clam up until there is no “hoarseness” in my voice at all, then speak carefully the following couple weeks.  So I won’t be talking excessively on the phone or telling loud stories, laughing obsessively or singing karaoke, for weeks at least.  Thinking of going without these things makes me really sad.  Thinking of doing them, however, makes me think of extreme pain, though.

Time to be grateful for what I have.  I am glad that I can hear, and enjoy the sounds of little things of late, little nuances of music and instruments and vocal tonalities and the heat register turning on and off.  Weird the things you begin to appreciate.

Filed under: 1000 things I'm grateful for, what i did last night   |  Leave a Comment

helicopter parents

26Jan10

I am thankful.  I love my job.  Sometimes it is trying and frustrating and crazy making, but that is honestly quite infrequent.  Lately it has just been weird.

This week basically starts out what I have fondly begun to refer to as “hell month.”  When March 1 comes around I might actually freak out and die from the shock of being slightly less busy.  I am already brainstorming and researching places I could potentially fly at the very last minute to get away for a couple of days.

Speaking of wanting to get away…the winters are brutal here, yesterday it got to the point where the universities actually cancelled classes for the day and sent students home.  I was supposed to stay.  I did.  It was interesting though…It was hard to walk a few yards outside without wondering if your face might blow off or just freeze the way it was.

People were safe in their homes and I was luckily safe in my warm office.  I figured that with everyone home playing video games because there was no school, I would have some free time to get ahead.  Not so much.  Apparently everyone decided to stay home and work on expanding their career.  And of course they needed my assistance.

Now, don’t get my wrong, I love my job.  Very much.  It’s just that over the last few weeks I have surprisingly received more inquiries from parents than I have from students.  Doesn’t that seem odd?  Truthfully sometimes parents can be far more demanding than students.  Often they do have nice things to say about their child.  Other times they seem offended when I ask questions about the student.

Altogether this troubles me.  Are parents just concerned because their (20 year old) child may not be able to find me on their own?  Do they just want to get information from me and pass it along to their (college age) child?  Will I ever meet their (adult) child?

I am glad to pass information on to a parent.   Always.  I am sincerely glad they are concerned.  I guess I just also hope that their (long out of high school) child has enough motivation about their career that when they actually start to look for jobs, they won’t need their parent to join them at the job interview to make the sale.

Filed under: 1000 things I'm grateful for, probably shouldn't have said that, what i did last night   |  Leave a Comment

alas, how to describe what I’ve been up to

12Jan10

A few folks have been asking me what I’ve been up to lately, and why I haven’t kept up the blog.  I did actually formulate a few musings I just haven’t posted.  The short answer is a mix of:  I partly don’t know and I partly don’t want to tell you.

The practical answer:  I was helping to put together a Christmas show at my church, get myself reasonably organized for the holidays, dig out of a menacing snowfall, get caught up at work, rest some.

The complicated but true answer:  This is earth shatteringly honest, and a bit uncomfortable to explain (though it may not feel that way to those outside my head).  I recently read this book about the intensely self-focused state of our culture, and have been contemplating the concepts a great deal.  I recommend the book.  So heartily, in fact, that when paperbacks come out this April I’m likely going to buy a million and start giving them to people.  I know that makes me sound like a nut case, but truthfully this book is the first and only I have read that has ever made me actually feel like I understand why the world is the way it is and why people are the way they are.  The book was absolutely fascinating and I find myself searching for other work from the authors/researchers for me to devour.   I have secretly begun to wonder if this is how I will be now (post extra college, etc.)…a colleague recently said to me, “Well, that’s the life of a scholar.”  I don’t know that I want to even think of myself in such away.  However, here I am writing a blog post on the state of our culture.  Said blog post is titled with the word “alas.”  Humph.

About a billion things in the book alerted me, but in particular what felt so alarming was that I realized I was reading about myself now and again.  I was reading about my own generation and why we are the way we are, why we feel lost, why we feel like we just haven’t done enough, why we suffer and banter and promote the way we do.

All in all, to be honest, I am sincerely struggling with the (related) concept surrounding this blog.  Readers would describe it in varying ways:  existential thoughts, a way to keep up with my life and times, random stories, etc.  However in its entire nature it’s arguably narcissistic.  It’s “all about me.”  I have been significantly wrestling with the concept.  Part of me feels that this is the direction of the culture; to promote oneself, to share arguably intimate thoughts and personal experiences in a public forum.  Part of me questions the purpose of the whole entity.  I like people, I like writing about random things that happen, this is really how I think, these are my real (periodically intimate) thoughts, feelings, desires, happenings.  I wonder whether this makes me courageous, or simply vainglorious.  Hence my hesitation in posting of late.

To conclude:  Those of you that know me know that I can get over the moon about some concept for a period of time and then suddenly get over it.  It’s an odd characteristic but true of me.  I wonder whether my learning about narcissism and its function in our culture, its function in my life, will truly cause me to change any of my behavior.  I’m honestly not sure when to move the way that culture is moving and when to fight it.  This platform has been encouraging and freeing and dangerous.  I have always enjoyed both writing posts and reading your comments.  I am not sure how this will pan out; whether the benefits outweigh the risks, whether I’m an over thinking idiot (or rather to what level…!).  I suppose, in the end, here I am again, sharing my struggle in progress, unaware of the end result.

Filed under: life overdramatized, probably shouldn't have said that   |  3 Comments

200th post

06Dec09

I had this random thought today:  years ago my roommate at the time told me a story about this guy that she knew.  When he was a young man he wrote himself a letter and dated it for seven years ahead of time and sealed it.  He wrote it for some sort of time capsule and eventually forgot about it.  About 10 years went by and he found it in a box when he was moving.  He pulled the letter out and read it to my roommate.   As a young man he had written to himself about everything that he would do with his life.  Surprisingly, outside of the names of his children, he got every detail right on.

For some reason I have been thinking about this frequently of late.  Though I have thought about it from time to time I am almost sure at least six or eight years have gone by since I first heard that story.  Quite often I have thought about writing myself a letter and hiding it for seven years.  I will admit, though, I am not young and idealistic anymore and I am a bit afraid to dream.  Much of the state of affairs of my life today have been unexpected, and many are still a dream come true.  It’s a bit funny that even now I am equally afraid to dream because I fear it won’t come true and because I fear that even my dreams might limit me.

Filed under: life overdramatized   |  2 Comments
Tags: 2017

pull me back to the ground again

06Dec09

There was this girl that I knew.  She was strikingly beautiful.  Strikingly.  The thing about her wasn’t that she was cover model gorgeous.  Actually, not really.  Instead she was outgoing and bright and intense.  Gregarious.  Everyone that met her fell in love with her.  The others, the ones that she was truly interested in often ended up blowing her off and her heart was repeatedly broken.  Eventually she realized that she had bigger dreams than romance and set out to make them come true.  During the process though, there was one man who could not let her go and was determined to win her heart.  He was unconventional, slightly unkempt, and scared out of his wits.  His heart was golden, but he didn’t know how to express that.  She jilted him, and few realized that it was her loss.

I am having an extremely narcissistic judgmental weekend.  I feel pretty sorry for myself.  I met someone this weekend and it was next to a disaster.  I wonder whether it’s my age or my stupidity that allowed me to end up where I am.  Still I am going to have to bring myself to come up with a tactful rejection speech because even the most successful storyteller knows that you can’t see even a heart of solid gold when it is blocked by extreme social awkwardness and untrimmed nose hairs visible to astronauts.

At the same time, I think of the stupid girl above and cross my fingers that I’m not just a less beautiful version of her.

Filed under: and so it goes   |  2 Comments